If the April Gu rains fail again this year, the livestock deaths across Somalia’s pastoral belt will trigger mass displacement on a scale the region’s humanitarian system and weak state authorities will be unable to handle.
Already by mid-December 2025, while on a fact-finding mission across northern Somalia and southern Ethiopia, I saw families that had exhausted every coping mechanism. In desperation, herders were feeding cardboard strips to their camels, coastal communities were crushing lobster shells for the cattle, and displaced families were gathering on town outskirts after losing everything.
The UN has estimated that at least 4.4 million people – one fifth of Somalia’s population – are currently going hungry after the fourth failed rainy season in a row.
I met UN staff and asked a direct question: What is the plan when suffering is already visible and spreading? Their response was sobering. They acknowledged that the humanitarian system is critically underfunded and was struggling with even current needs.
Cash is a major problem. The 2025 Humanitarian Response Plan has received only 24% of its required funding. Somalia’s 2026 drought response needs $296.5 million to aid those at risk but has secured barely 9% of that amount.
As drought conditions worsened last year, food assistance coverage plummeted. In August, it had reached 1.1 million people, only to fall to just 350,000 by November. Over 200 health and nutrition facilities also closed their doors in 2025.
The choice between who receives assistance and who doesn’t is an impossible one. It’s at best triage, even though it’s a crisis we saw coming – evidence once more of an early warning alarm that went unanswered.
Yet funding is not the only barrier, politics is also blocking basic operational logic. In northern Somalia, regional humanitarian teams have been inhibited from travelling between Garowe, the capital of semi-autonomous Puntland, and the town of Las Anod in the newly established Northeast Region – just 130 kilometres up the road.
This is not a conflict between ordinary citizens: It’s a dispute between political leaders over administrative control in a three-way battle that pits the authorities in Puntland against the Mogadishu-aligned Northeast, and the self-declared independent Somaliland.
The tensions have disrupted trade and humanitarian coordination across northern Somalia. That includes humanitarian access to the 200,000 displaced people around Las Anod who were forced from their homes when fighting broke out in 2023 between Somaliland – intent on retaining administrative control – and the local communities who rejected it.
As a consultant for the Shaikh Group, a political consultancy working to advance peacebuilding through political dialogue and mediation, I travelled across northern Somalia, Somaliland, and southern Ethiopia last year.
My main objective was to ascertain the capacity and funding needs of mediation structures and efforts – to explore whether mediation can work when drought and division are moving faster than diplomacy.
What I witnessed convinced me that peace is possible, but the window is narrowing before coping strategies collapse entirely and suffering becomes irreversible. Leaders need to act with urgency and humility before ordinary families are tipped into even deeper disaster.
Mediation by the elders
The meetings I held with elders In Jijiga, in Ethiopia’s southern Somali region, gave me some hope. Their mediation work has helped sustain the peace established by the 2018 Asmara Agreement that ended decades of conflict between the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and the Ethiopian government.
The legitimacy and influence these elders possess resonates across all Somali communities, extending into Somalia and Somaliland through shared kinship networks and clan affiliations.
That legitimacy matters now more than ever. The fighting over Las Anod between Somaliland forces and local clans demanding separation ended in places without a durable ceasefire. Prisoners of war are still in captivity in Las Anod and the Somaliland capital of Hargeysa.
A conflict “pause” is not real peace, it’s only a quieter stage of the war. The underlying tensions that led to the local clans demanding direct administration by Mogadishu – rejecting both Somaliland and Puntland’s territorial claims – still bubble. The humanitarian cost of the fighting has also been inadequately addressed.
The good news is that all sides accepted the mediation by the Jijiga elders, which began in April last year.
Meanwhile, there is the drought. In the northern regions, rainfall levels are 60% below average – the driest conditions recorded since 1981. In Puntland, water prices are an extortionate $12-15 per 200-litre barrel, and malnutrition rates are surging.
Any humanitarian response must of course be government-led and locally enabled. International agencies can support, but only the authorities can guarantee access, provide security arrangements, and functioning coordination across territories.
Yet in the north, bureaucratic hurdles and political tensions mean aid teams cannot travel freely. The lack of coordination results in duplication, delay, and unnecessary suffering.
When – as a result of misplaced egos – leaders treat aid access as a political weapon, the population inevitably becomes the target.
What needs to be done
In Ethiopia’s Somali Region, I witnessed the opposite – a functioning locally-led response. Pastoralists still have accessible water points and remnants of pasture that have disappeared across the border. Somali herders are welcomed by the authorities, yet their movement is managed. Weapons are collected upon entry, and returned when the herders travel back to Somalia.
In a region drowning in mistrust, this kind of pragmatic management provides hospitality without insecurity – a lesson worth noting.
Yet sadly in Puntland and the Northeast we have division instead. That includes hate speech on social media with inflammatory clan-based attacks; territorial claims that deny others people’s legitimacy; and the ever-present threat of military escalation.
One viral moment can shatter months of painstaking peace work by the elders.
Leaders and elites across Somali territories therefore must watch their rhetoric. If we want mediation to succeed, we need disciplined public messaging and zero tolerance for incitement.
Somali youth – at home and in the diaspora – should redirect their energies from stoking online division to practical solidarity. Try fundraising, awareness, and providing proper support to drought-hit families instead.
Thenewhumanitarian.org